It was the week before Christmas, and D.A. Henderson was alarmed about germs. He isn?t easily rattled: Dr. Henderson led the successful worldwide effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s, and he directed the U.S. Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness after the deadly anthrax letter attacks and the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. But recently not just one but two laboratories had engineered the virus known as bird flu to make it easily transmissible?through the air, among mammals?and that was a scary development. “Compared to plague or to anthrax, this one has a potential for disaster that dwarfs all others,” says Dr. Henderson, now a distinguished scholar at the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “Given our flu-vaccine capacity, which is limited, this could be a catastrophe if it gets out.” The experiments shouldn?t have been done, in his view, and?partly because they could give terrorists a blueprint for making a more deadly form of H5N1 avian-influenza virus?they certainly shouldn?t be published.
UW-Madison virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, are mentioned in this article.